On Media

Women Rule profile: CNN's Arwa Damon

As part of POLITICO's Women Rule series, I spoke with CNN international correspondent Arwa Damon on how she got to where she is now:

Arwa Damon lives by the law of perpetual motion. Over the past week alone, the CNN correspondent, 36, whipped through Washington, D.C., to receive an award from Oxfam; set off on a Grand Canyon hiking trip with her sister; and prepared for a likely assignment to the world’s most recent hotspot, Crimea — the next stop on a reporting career that, over the past few months alone, has included stints in Congo, South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda, Syria and Turkey.

Born in Boston, the daughter of an American father and a Syrian mother, Damon spent much of her childhood in Morocco and Istanbul before returning stateside to study at Boston College. She was a 25-year-old working for a textile company in New York as the Iraq War approached; she decided she had to be on hand to help document history. So she headed to Baghdad with no real journalism experience — and no full-time job waiting. Over just a few years, a combination of a solid language background — she’s fluent in Arabic, French and Turkish, highly sought skills that helped her land her first foreign reporting jobs — and punishing work schedule helped drive her up the career ladder from day-rate freelancer to CNN mainstay, now based out of Beirut.

In a recent conversation, Damon, who is single, revealed her biggest fear — and how she learned that moving through life full throttle doesn’t mean there aren’t times you’ve got to put your foot on the brake: “Now, 10 years on, I recognize when I reach the point when I need to take time off…”